Having said that, I did like the comment: “everybody is free to contribute as little as they can get away with” and I’m thinking about making it my mantra for life

But i digress. Great job so far guys, although I will be interested to learn how further development funding will be achieved and what the business plan will kick up in this regard.

Actually, the Steering Group is not comprised of CKAN Association members by default. The only default access is to the Advisory Group (see: http://ckan.org/about/association/) and this is only for those members at the Gold level.

The steering group is comprised of key stakeholders who have committed to oversee and steer the CKAN Association going forward. My personal experience in that regard is based on pushing my company into the gold member position, working to help the project within the C&C Team, and generally trying to commit my time and resources as much as possible to the project. After doing that kind of stuff over a period of time I was invited to join the steering group by its existing members. I’m cool with that right now, but as is mentioned here: http://ckan.org/about/steering-group/, “going forward we anticipate establishing a specific process by which new members are nominated and selected”.

On the comment, “‘non-developer’ in-kind contributions are much less useful” << I’m not sure if that is entirely true. One of the issues with CKAN is that the supply of developers does not meet the demand of users. We need to educate developers on the project to try and grow that community and translate that into a much bigger pool of developers working to advance the project. This is actually an exceptionally good position to be in, as it is normally the other way around with open source projects. Enough people excited about developing the tech, but maybe not enough people using the tech.

There are some things I’m trying to get done that I hope will elevate the awareness of the CKAN project with developers. There are also tasks which should help to give the project a ‘core mission’ outside its technical roadmap. These are all pretty important things so where we find organisations or people willing to donate their in-kind skills and time I think that it is important to accept such donations into the project. Yes, we need code above and beyond all of this, but lets not try to say no to any offer of help at this stage.

There is a lot you are suggesting via your comment I haven’t addressed – apologies for not covering it all but please feel free to ask follow up questions for any further clarity on anything :)

Most members contributing in-kind means the whole Steering Committee is in the same boat. So if there is any suspicion that any one party is not contributing their share, will anybody from the Steering Committee really rock this boat?

The problem is that you are policing yourselves. And since nobody is paying cold, hard cash, there is not a single member who has enough skin in the game to call out all the other ones for not contributing enough. In fact, as it is now, everybody is free to contribute as little as they can get away with, as long as it is not too much less than any other member. Eventually this drives all your contributions down to the level of minimum plausible deniability.

Because frankly, for the number of members contributing in-kind, I don’t see a correspondingly high number of commits going into the core. And ‘non-developer’ in-kind contributions are much less useful. OKF has the advocacy and admin side covered fairly well.

So please, separate the memberships into paying memberships and in-kind memberships. And start being transparent about how much who is contributing in-kind, and document those contributions. Otherwise the credibility of the Steering Committee will come into question.

Community questions (Q) and Steering Group (SG) responses below. I’ll also add this into a forthcoming post with the meeting minutes.

Q: Is the SG interested in increasing transparency of the SG meetings? How will this be achieved?

SG: Yes. This was discussed and we would like to propose the next meeting be run in two parts. One part will be closed to attend to some regular business of the group with regard to coordinating efforts. The second half will be broadcast as a Hangout on Air for people to watch. We’ll aim to collect questions ahead of the meetings and address them during the broadcast with further options for an active Q&A session from the audience.

Q: Have the SG determined whether members of the association are yet contributing funds, or developers to the project? What are they? What happens if members don’t? SG: There is ongoing work in this area. Most members are contributing in-kind (not exclusively developers). We’d be happy to make the pledged contributions public via the members listing on CKAN.org. At this time it is an honour system with regard to meeting membership obligations that are provided in-kind. If a member is suspected of not providing the expected level of in-kind contribution then the Steering Group will investigate and consider appropriate actions upon conclusion of such investigations.

Q: How does the SG see its role with respect to providing direction for the project?

SG: Support the community of both technical stakeholders and users in ways which allow them to act in concert to move the project forward in the direction these stakeholders determine to be best for the project.

Q: How is the SG raising more funds, other than membership, to further fund development of CKAN?

SG: This is a question the Steering Group is working through currently. Our focus is on the Business Plan and putting strategic objectives down for all to see via that document. Grant applications and the coordination of requirements to meet the needs of a group of platform owners is also being considered. With the latter the proposed approach is to release an expression of interest for funding support against specific development activities. Those who highly value such activities would be asked to help contribute to a pool of funds that would then see the development work paid for.